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Semiotician, psychoanalyst, novelist, author of more than a dozen books, Julia Kristeva has become one of the most prominent figures in French intellectual life over the past 25 years. Although the English version of the book under review makes little explicit use of psychoanalytic theory except for the concept of sadomasochism, it could only have been written by an analyst. The French version, a tour de force some six times the length of the English, has a few densely psychoanalytic sections, unfortunately not the most persuasive parts of the book. Le temps sensible is by turns fascinating, annoying, insightful, pretentious, and moving. It ranges from charmingly intimate discussion of half a dozen major characters to metapsychological speculation, comparisons with the philosophy of Heidegger, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, and detailed syntactic analysis of one sentence, complete with a schematic inspired by generative grammar and a typographic presentation reminiscent of Mallarmé's Un coup de dés. The English version, the 1992 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury, is much more restrained and accessible, and this review concentrates on it.
Given the banishment of the author by much contemporary literary theory, the most refreshing aspect of Kristeva's reading is the quiet way in which she moves back and forth between Proust and the narrator of the novel without any portentous musings on the “subject.” She treats characters as people—a ridiculous naïveté in the eyes of many literary critics—and in one parenthesis states flatly that identifying with characters is “the only way to read”